Burning Man revellers dance at sunrise. The 10-day desert festival is turning 30 this year, but a lot has changed since is started on a beach in San Francisco.
Photograph: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

The client, who shall remain nameless, has more money than time. Much, much more money.

So when he has to prepare for Burning Man – the eight-day desert festival with bedrock principles including “radical self-reliance”, “radical self-expression”, “decommodification” and “participation” – he does what any self-respecting rich guy would do.

He hires a stylist, spends between $10,000 and $12,000, and has someone else express herself on his behalf.

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“He is too busy in his life to spend time making costumes, and of course, costumes are a big part of the whole event,” says stylist Jasmien Hamed. “I make a whole concept for him, what I think he should be dressed like, what alter ego he should have. And shop for him and organize him and off he goes.”

Burning Man is turning 30, and with maturity comes change. What began as the solstice torching of a wooden effigy on a San Francisco beach in inky darkness among anarchic friends has morphed into a pricey end-of-summer romp in the Nevada desert for 65,000 plus.

Planes fly in. Swanky camps called “plug and plays” are constructed, some by paid staff. Tens of thousands of dollars are plunked down. Artworks loom large and elaborate. Controversy swirls, much of it around money, exclusivity and their impact on a cultural event that longtime burners swear has changed their hearts, their lives, and their tolerance for sand in the most intimate of places.

An aerial view of Burning Man, which takes place in the remote Black Rock desert of Nevada. Photograph: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

“The year that planes started landing out there was when things changed,” said John “Parts” Taylor, who has been attending Burning Man since 1998, making the long trek out to the middle of nowhere in the Black Rock desert to create art, a camp, a community and an experience. All by hand.

“If time was money, even billionaires couldn’t afford Burning Man” before the airport opened sometime around 2002, Taylor said. “The potential for large amounts of money to be spent was there even early on, but the airport … radically changed access to the event.”

By 2014, Burning Man had hit what Taylor and his art partner Charles “the Goat” Raggio call the festival’s financial flashpoint. That’s when an elaborate camp called Caravancicle offended the sensibilities of regular burners.

The year that planes started landing out there was when things changed

John 'Parts' Taylor, longtime Burner

Hired hands built the vast encampment and served meals and drinks. Under Burning Man’s radical “gifting” culture, even complete strangers who wander into a camp are supposed to be served; in turn, they are expected to do the same for others. But at Caravancicle, some burners were turned away and hospitality was withheld.

That camp’s founder, billionaire venture capitalist Jim Tananbaum, posted an alternately humble and prickly apology, blaming logistical breakdowns and misunderstandings for the desert debacle. He was sorry, he said, for offending anyone at the festival, which he has attended for years and deeply loves.

“Burning Man welcomes people from all walks of life,” he wrote. “Referring to Caravancicle campers or members of any other camp as ‘the rich people’ is creating a class system within Burning Man, which I don’t believe is beneficial to the community.”

Burning Man founder Larry Harvey wrote his own lengthy essay, which strongly defended the better-heeled denizens of the playa. But he also acknowledged how much the festival’s original ethos had changed since he and his friends built a tall wooden man and torched him on Baker beach in 1986.

He called the essay Equality, Inequity, Iniquity: Concierge Culture.

“There can certainly be no doubt that there are conspicuous camps in Black Rock City that have practiced what I call concierge culture, and their missteps have been many,” Harvey wrote. “They have fielded members-only art cars, they have withdrawn from surrounding neighborhoods, and it would appear a few of these camps may have stationed security guards at camp entrances.

“They have, in other words, swaddled their members in a kind of cocoon that bears a strong resemblance to a gated community.”

A tea ceremony at Burning Man in 2011. Participation, exploration and gift-giving are part of the festival’s ethos. Photograph: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

For Burning Man 2016, which begins 28 August, veteran festivalgoers Taylor and Raggio are building a vast art installation that takes direct aim at the concierge culture. Dubbed Plug ’n Play, it is “a tribute to the essential power of hip-hop and its 5 foundational elements”. The installation is shaped like “the huge positive end of an extension cord plug, birthed from the playa, pointing to the sky”.

Beyond teaching burners how to DJ and appreciate the roots of hip-hop, Taylor said, Plug ’n Play is meant to address “the elephant on the playa” – extravagant camps and their standoffish owners.

“We don’t need to burn them to the ground,” Taylor said. “Let’s figure out how to have a conversation, have them engage with the Burning Man community at large.”

And ridicule them at the same time.

Said Raggio of the installation and its impact on high-end viewers: “There’s a giant element of ‘jack-them-around’ while they’re looking at it.”